Article June 24, 1911 Issue

THE LIFE THAT TELLS

ROBERT NALL.

The spiritual life is the life of doing. "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only." The habit of meditation may be usefully cultivated, but we have no right to be content therewith. It has become axiomatic that the best testimony to the truth of Christianity is that of a simple, earnest, practical Christian life. We are not to live in the clouds. We are called upon, however reluctant we may be, to engage in a great conflict; and the student of Christian Science will avoid much wandering into the wilderness of doubt and fear if he sits down and calmly ponders over what that conflict means, what it involves. Even though he has caught only a glimpse of what Christian Science teaches, that glimpse may have been sufficient to enable him to correct some of the errors of material sense. Previously these errors may not have been to him a matter of much concern, but the dawn of Truth always awakens that faculty of spiritual discernment which enables a student to differentiate between right and wrong thinking, and to associate his mental equipment with some insight into that which is real, as distinguished from the unreal.

More or less, we are all in a probationary state of spiritual thought. The acknowledgment of this should inspire us to further advance. There could of course be no progress, "man's distinctive mark alone," as Browning tells us, "were all it struggles after found at first and guesses changed to knowledge absolute." The servant is not above his master, and the conflicts of Jesus are those in a lesser degree of every aspiring follower. A study of the temptations to which he was subjected and of the victories which he won, a study yielding a mine of spiritual profit, will arouse in us a deep sense of gratitude that the way has been shown to us by which we may overcome all our enemies.

The spiritual power which made him more than conqueror is available to all mankind. Do we remember what all that means? He was in the wilderness; he was "with the wild beasts;" he was physically hungry—alone and in danger. Typical this of lesser men who have strayed into the "far country," and for long remained unconscious that the Father's house and the Father's arms were open to them if they would return. "Soul, take thine ease," is the comforting decision of the Laodicean and the materialist, but it should find no place in the thought of the Christian Scientist. The "wild beasts" of mortal mind, the false concepts of materiality, the carnal thoughts which come in like a flood upon the unwary one, must be scientifically met, and their assumed power, which, if acknowledged to be real, cannot be other than destructive of peace and happiness, must be shown to be purely fictitious.

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